Florence, unveiled the rearrangement of the Museo Novecento collection. Here are all the new features

The rearrangement of the collection of the Museo Novecento in Florence, desired by artistic director Sergio Risaliti, is ready. The permanent collection “Alberto Della Ragione,” named after the engineer who donated it to the City of Florence in 1970, thus returns accessible to the public according to a logic that allows a better enjoyment, and with it also the entire surface of the museum is now enjoyable by visitors in its entirety. The rearrangement was conducted through a reorganization of the spaces in such a way as to allow rotating enjoyment of the collection’s holdings.

The collection, arranged on the second floor of the museum, has been divided into nine sections: Landscapes, Still Life, The Artist and His World, Faces. Portraits, Chivalry, Sculpture and Painted Sculpture, Nude, Gestures. Suspended Poses and Theaters. For each of these, a selection of works has been developed that has been rethought according to a criterion of chronological scanning and thematic display. In addition, along with the collection, the Ottone Rosai Bequest also finds its place in the complex’s rooftop. The rest of the museum is instead dedicated to temporary exhibitions. There are four upcoming projects: "Solo. Emilio Vedova“ (May 26-Sept. 6), which focuses on works by the Venetian artist belonging to the Florentine civic collections along with a selection of works from other public and private collections, ”Tutto è natura. Luciana Majoni“ (May 26-Sept. 6) dedicated to the artist’s photographs, as well as Massimo Nannucci’s relational installation ”Waiting Rooms - Flying Carpets“ (May 26-Sept. 6), featuring a selection of kilim carpets provided by Boralevi, and the preview of the exhibition ”Eliseo Mattiacci. Gong" (May 26-October 14), which will open at Forte Belvedere on June 2.

“The exhibition space on the second floor has been profoundly transformed,” said Sergio Risaliti. “I intended to give up the ’room with a view’ effect, privileging the inside (the paintings, sculptures) over the outside (the view of the square). Giving up the magnetism of the Renaissance means making room for the discovery, work after work, of 20th-century figurative ’poetry.’ To allow the necessary quiet time for contemplation, from which understanding flows. A simple, clear path by themes and genres, definitely propaedeutic. It should also not be underestimated that there was no museum space in Florence adequate to international standards. Today, with a new layout, we are improving and updating the design of the exhibition spaces, with a more contemporary perspective.”

Below is a text outlining the path of the Alberto Della Ragione collection:

With a transversal slant, the new layout within the Museo Novecento intends to dwell on some fundamental aspects of Italian art of the first half of the twentieth century, outlining and deepening recurring motifs and themes within the collection donated by the engineer Della Ragione to the city of Florence in 1970, and highlighting unprecedented connections.

What are the interests and taste of a collector like Alberto Della Ragione? What themes, subjects, and styles guide his choices? A courageous patron, Della Ragione devoted himself to art from the late 1920s, when, still wary of the production of his time, he purchased his first nineteenth-century works. His encounter with twentieth-century art was sealed by his visit to the Roman Quadriennale in 1931. Responding to the ethical urge “not to pass with closed eyes among the art of his own time, but to give the work of the living artist the legitimate comfort of a timely understanding,” he began to offer his support to young artists, often overlooked by the market and the official critics of the Regime. Since then his collection of contemporary art, which was already one of the largest existing in Italy in the 1940s, has steadily grown.

Nine are the sections into which Sergio Risaliti, in collaboration with Eva Francioli, Francesca Neri and Stefania Rispoli, has chosen to divide the new display at the Museo Novecento, cadencing the itinerary on genres and themes so as to facilitate the visitor in discovering and understanding this important legacy. In Still Life, a genre that also enjoys a certain success in twentieth-century Italian painting, one finds the magic underlying the painting of Antonio Donghi and the dry essentiality of Felice Casorati, the references to personal and autobiographical experiences contained in numerous still lifes by Mario Mafai and Renato Guttuso, who confront Giorgio Morandi and Corrado Cagli. Landscape is represented within the collection thanks to a significant sampling of views. A journey through the variety of the Italian landscape, which lives on the contrasts between the harshness of the mountain peaks celebrated by Mario Sironi and the flat seascapes of Carlo Carrà, and passes through the intimacy of the enclosed space represented by Antonio Donghi and the soft hillside profiles extolled by Renato Birolli, Bruno Cassinari, Osvaldo Licini, Giorgio Morandi and Ottone Rosai. The more intimate and familiar landscapes are joined by Virgilio Guidi’s rarefied homage to the almost abstract essentiality of the sea. TheArtist and His World offers a special invitation to get in touch with the painter and his tools: from Mario Sironi’s painter’s studio to the works of Filippo De Pisis, Felice Casorati and Carlo Levi. The awareness of one’s own image and the need to remember and be remembered are intertwined in the practice of portraiture, thus Faces. Portraits, opened by Mario Mafai’s self-portrait, gives an excursus from the intense confrontation between the idealizing preciousness of Antonietta Raphael, to the dry naturalism of Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzù. Similarly, the rough and archaizing painting of Massimo Campigli coexists with the brushstrokes of Francesco Menzio, as well as the synthetic painting of Virgilio Guidi and the Novecento purism of Pompeo Borra. The Cavalleria section sees artists such as Fortunato Depero, Marino Marini and Lucio Fontana engaged in a confrontation with a theme dear to the figurative tradition, the horse, declined according to different languages and sensibilities, while Pittura scolpita e scultura dipinta celebrates those works that represent the fusion of painting and sculpture, often bringing with it a fading of the subject into the irregular movement of form. The works of Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Migneco, Carlo Levi, as well as Ennio Morlotti, whose expressionism translates into a dense, agglomerated stroke, are examples of this material painting, in comparison with Lucio Fontana’s pasty ceramics. The study and depiction of the human body is a constant in art history. Although for many centuries the male nude played a predominant role, in modern times it is mainly the female body that is the focus of pictorial and sculptural investigation And so in Nudes. The Female Universe, the works of Felice Casorati and Arturo Martini, Mario Mafai, Marino Marini and Mario Sironi could not be missing. Gestures. Pose sospese, is the section that instead encloses moments hidden behind a wait, a moment of quiet or agitation, but also instants in which ideas and intentions seek their own order, as recalled in the works of Felice Casorati, Virgilio Guidi, Roberto Melli, Ottone Rosai, Arturo Martini and Marino Marini. Finally, the Teatrini, that is, objects, forms and figures without apparent connections that unfold enigmatically within a painting where compositions poised between dream and reality are born, in which each element is called upon to ’play’ a role. The works of Renato Paresce and Giuseppe Viviani are examples of this, as are those of Giorgio De Chirico, Mario Sironi and Gino Severini or even those of the futurists Fillia and Enrico Prampolini.

Altana: permanent collection-Otto Rosai

In 1963 an important corpus of works by Ottone Rosai was donated by his widow Francesca Fei and brother Oreste to the City of Florence. The bequest is organized around the two thematic nuclei of portraits and views. The series of the Tondini and the Amici, made between the 1940s and 1950s, are dedicated to people dear to the painter: poets, critics and artists, including Piero Bigongiari, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Giorgio De Chirico, who testify to the fertile cultural milieu in which Rosai found himself working. These are flanked by Rosai’s views of Florence from the years 1954 and 1955. The Museo Novecento thus intends to pay tribute to a master of 20th-century Tuscan art, whose painting in his mature years is characterized by an original dialogue between harsh realism and expressionist technique.

Florence, unveiled the rearrangement of the Museo Novecento collection. Here are all the new features

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